Thursday, 13 August 2015

Little Girls - Ronald Malfi's Classic in the Making

Ronald Malfi scores a massive hit with his
latest – Little Girls. Laurie Genarro returns to her childhood home
which she has never revisited since her mother took her away from there suddenly
when Laurie was a child. In that long-ago childhood, Laurie had a friend who
lived next door. Sadie Russ was the sort of child no one should have as a
friend – and most kids wouldn’t have wanted to. Laurie grew to both hate and
fear her – for good reason. Now Laurie has a child of her own – Susan – around the
same age Laurie was when a terrible accident happened and her friend next door
died.

Then there is the sinister matter of how
her father met his end. Suffering from dementia, he had become obsessed with keeping
some nameless person or monster out of his house. The door at the bottom of the
stairs leading to the tiny room he called the ‘belvedere’ was always kept
locked. Yet, it was from a window of that room he fell to his death in the middle
of the night. Now Laurie must confront some significant demons of the past and
she is particularly unnerved to discover her daughter has taken up with a new
playmate – a girl who bears an uncanny resemblance to long-dead Sadie, and who
is living next door.

I adore a great ghost story and I loved
this book. It kept me glued to the page, and thinking about it when I reluctantly
had to tear myself away to deal with the business of real life. There are so
many secrets to uncover, so many twists and turns and such a fabulously
unexpected ending. The plot unfolds at a perfect pace, the smells, sights and
sounds of the locations spring from the page, and the characters are real,
their reactions natural, their fears transmitting themselves into the reader’s
brain with an author’s deftness and skill I thoroughly appreciated.

This
is my first Ronald Malfi and I am now looking forward to catching up with his
back catalogue. Can’t wait!